


Undisclosed

by 221b_hound



Series: Unkissed [29]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: BAMF John, Blackmail, Blood and Torture, M/M, Secret Identity, Sherlock To The Rescue, Trust, rework Agatha from canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-03
Updated: 2015-02-03
Packaged: 2018-03-10 06:51:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,621
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3280823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/221b_hound/pseuds/221b_hound
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Milverton is alarmed when Sherlock Holmes goes missing, and is determined to uncover his plans. The best way to do that, he thinks, is to send brutal men after John Watson, and make the doctor tell where Sherlock is. John swears he doesn't know; Sherlock has gone back to his old ways. Keeping secrets. And certainly, there are secrets being kept here. Deadly, dangerous secrets.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Undisclosed

**Author's Note:**

> This is a nasty one, guys, but there are two stories to go in this sequence. I will reassure you now. Milverton will not prevail. Oh, hell, no.

Appledore Mansion was a grand 18th century house, once opulent, and restored to that state in recent years by its owner, Charles Augustus Milverton. This mansion overlooked the sea near Copt Point, Folkestone, and was designed to impress from both sea and land, but also to ensure privacy. Milverton loathed people (a sentiment that was universally mutual), and his business interests and certain vampiric character traits meant that he liked to let people know he was both wealthy and untouchable.

The mansion had been restored and redecorated in the best taste that money could buy. Its exterior remained resolutely Georgian, but parts of the interior had been upgraded to the most modern design, particularly when it came to surveillance and security, along with a few more unusual features aimed at access and egress for Milverton’s particular kind of clientele, at either end of his money chain.

Now Milverton had turned his attentions to the neglected grounds, meaning to craft them into a kind of wall, a safety barrier. One to keep out potential assassins (and there were fewer of those than you’d expect; most were too crushed to try). More importantly, it was to guard Appledore from prying eyes, a security necessary to encourage his discreet visitors. It was imperative, after all, that the flow of information on which he relied for his life’s work have a way of reaching him. And the people who arrived to pay him large sums of cash too, of course. Or to beg. Sometimes they came to beg and he also enjoyed that immensely.

Hence the little landing area on the beach below the Point, with the rickety, awkward path up to the stand of oak and pine trees overlooking the Channel (and that other entrance, less often used, beneath a rocky overhang). Hence too the desire for a maze of hedges, stands of more sheltering trees, artificially created mounds and hillocks and ditches that would confound intruders but provide hidden ways for people to meet with him.

The groundsmen had been at work on the new landscaping for three weeks now. The work was detailed and difficult and involved the engagement of a number of specialists. Hence, also, the employment of the Davey Spratt, although Milverton was only vaguely aware of Spratt.

Davey Spratt, a fifty year old landscaper from Cornwall who specialised in garden reticulation and vegetation that would thrive in high, wind-swept, coastal locales, was a tall man with a surly stoop, and a circumspect manner. He stood and stared at problems for a long time before making a pronouncement about the work required, and then once his client had consented, he went about completing the work with a stolid, methodical stubbornness. He had an even temper and no discernable sense of humour. Divorced, disappointed that his son had chosen a career in the City instead of his father’s business, with a soft spot for buxom blondes; he was always businesslike on the job though he enjoyed a pint (but not more than a pint). He kept himself to himself, was good at his work, and had a reputation for punctuality, cleanliness and never putting his nose into things that were not his business.

He had been engaged as a sub-contractor to the Milverton property work only two weeks ago, vouched for in no uncertain terms by the large landscaping firm Milverton had already vetted. Spratt proved his worth, and had thoroughly mapped out the reticulation system required to maintain the hedge maze requested by the owner. He had recommended several suitable types of hedge, plus other vegetation required to maintain soil health and wind breaks while offering some aesthetic grandeur and appeal, all of which were taken on board by the chief landscapers.

Spratt had struck up a nodding acquaintance with Milverton’s cook, a buxom blonde of the type he usually liked, and a goodcook to boot. She fed the workers simple but hearty meals as part of the contract – they weren’t allowed to leave the property in the middle of the day for food. She exchanged laconic observations about the weather and the work with them, and Spratt liked that she didn’t mind him coming in to the downstairs kitchen and laundry areas to check the meters and some of the pipes and generally sections of the water and sewerage systems that were given him a bit of grief now and then.

Milverton had seen Spratt in passing, and dismissed him. An unremarkable man who was good at his job, but not of any other interest. Especially not when Milverton had other important issues to pursue.

The engagement of _other_ types of workers, for example. Underhand, hardened kinds of workers whose brutal services were paid for in large deposits to secret accounts and the threat of unpleasant consequences if Milverton’s connection with the… _work_ he was requesting was ever revealed.

Because Charles Augustus Milverton needed, rather urgently, to track down the hunter who had been tracking him but had recently disappeared. He had no time to waste on gardeners with proven records who didn’t even have any interesting information to sell.

Something of a mistake, of course, because Davey Spratt was in fact a remarkable man.

The most remarkable thing about Davey Spratt being that, despite various proofs to the contrary, he did not, in fact, exist.

*

For three days after burning the photograph Milverton had sent him, John Watson continued to operate in London almost as usual. He answered emails and queries from the blogs, assessing which were cases Sherlock might take on, and judging how long they could wait.

He paid bills and sent invoices for payment due on successful cases, in those instances where he and Sherlock had charged for their services. He did his shifts at the clinic. He fended off requests for assistance from Lestrade and anyone else at the Met who called.

He did none of these things graciously, though. At best, he did them quietly and circumspectly. At worst, he did them with a scowl and a snarl.

When Lestrade asked why Sherlock refused to come to view a crime scene, John growled at him, “He’s not here, all right? He’s on a case.”

“Where is he?” Lestrade asked, curious.

“ _On a fucking case, how should I know where?_ ” was the tense and furious response.

After three days, everyone, including Molly and Mrs Hudson, stopped asking him.

At New Scotland Yard, a few unsentimental people began to argue whether this development counted as Trouble In Paradise for the purposes of the book they’d been keeping on Those Berks At Baker Street.

*

Davey Spratt chatted to the cook, Agnieszka Raczek, on and off. He garnered, without her telling him so, that she was not only Milverton’s cook but his food-taster as well. As in, Aggie tasted every item of food before Milverton ate it, whether or not she had cooked it, whether or not it was clearly factory-made. He would choose the random portions from which she took the bite, and she would chew and swallow it, and they would wait five minutes to be sure there were no symptoms, and then he would consume his meal.

Aggie had tasted some very fine and rare foods and wines this way, all tempered by the knowledge that any attempt to poison him (by her or by any outside source) would surely kill her first. It turned the expensive tastes somewhat to ashes in her mouth.

Spratt knew that she had become very dangerously ill on at least three occasions, requiring hospitalisation. He suspected, but could not yet confirm, that at least one of the poisonings had been her own attempt to do him in.

He also knew that Agnieszka Raczek was only a cook in the same way that he was a landscape gardener, and that therefore her presence in Milverton’s household meant both that Milverton had a very tight stranglehold on her, and that it amused him to make her cook for him and risk poisoning for him.

One thing Spratt did know was that Aggie Raczek hated Charles Augustus Milverton with a zeal that rivalled his own.

*

Business – actual investments in banks and in stock, though he was always conservative with those, as well as his more usual kind of trade – called Milverton to London proper for a week, an hour and a half away from Folkestone. So he left Appledore in the hands of the workers he had vetted, and under the watchful eye of his cook (who was so much more, or possibly so much less, than a cook. She had too much at risk to betray him).

The investments were going poorly, but the other business was proving as fruitful as ever. He should have been, if not happy, for he was never really _happy_ , but at least satisfied.

He was not.

Charles Augustus Milverton was _irritated._

The photograph he had acquired some years ago (never used against the intended recipient, who had managed to get himself shot dead by a burglar) should have caused spectacular fallout at Baker Street, and yet it seemed nothing of that nature had occurred. Nothing reportable, at any event. Except that Sherlock Holmes had stepped out of Baker Street the next morning with a small suitcase and a ticket to France on the Eurostar.

The husband, Watson, had left the premises some hours later, surly and taciturn, and proceeded to display a foul temper at every turn. A fight, no doubt, had taken place, but had it destroyed them as completely as intended?

Milverton doubted it, because Holmes had not arrived in France. Holmes had in fact disappeared without trace. And that meant that Milverton was not merely irritated. He was increasingly alarmed.

Sherlock Holmes had made it clear that it was his intention to destroy Milverton. He had somehow shored up the two most likely prospects for undermining those efforts, and Martha Hudson and Harriet Watson had both proven difficult targets. He had plans up his sleeve for them both of course, but they might be employed more in the way of revenge than leverage, the way things were going.

Milverton thought it very unlikely that Holmes could achieve much. The man’s attempts, for example, to discover where the evidence against his victims was held was amusingly inept. But Holmes was tenacious, and clever, and _missing_. He most certainly was not in Europe, fleeing in disgrace from an outraged husband. He was therefore most certainly still in Great Britain, planning god knew what.

And it was in that absence of knowledge of what Holmes could possibly be planning that Milverton’s agitation and alarm lay. He could not imagine what Holmes’s plans were. That surely only meant that the meddling detective’s plans were singularly clever, and therefore singularly dangerous.

He had to know. Milverton had spent his entire life building walls, shoring up his strength, making himself untouchable. He simply _had to know_ where Holmes’s fatal blow was being calculated to fall.

Watson, Milverton thought, should know where Holmes was. Watson, in all likelihood, knew _exactly_ what his frigid slut of a know-it-all husband was doing, or could have an educated guess.

Milverton never soiled his hands on information extraction. But he knew… _gardeners_ , as it were. Men who worked in blood and bone, _oh yes_. They were very good at digging up information.

He transferred the funds and sent a photograph and waited, like a glossy, black spider in the middle of his web, for reports on his angry, futile little flies.

Milverton would find Holmes; he would present to him the material provided by Victor Trevor, along with the other little gems Milverton had been polishing, and he would smile when Sherlock Holmes collapsed like a marionette before offering up his strings to Charles Augustus Milverton.

 _Oh yes, he would_.

*

“I can help you,” muttered Davey Spratt to Aggie Raczek after lunch on the third day, “We can get rid of Milverton together. I have a plan.”

Spratt had to move, quick-smart, before Aggie Raczek skewered him with the boning knife or broke his skull with the cast iron skillet. She wielded both weapons much less like a cook and much more like someone used to slicing and crushing people with any object ready to hand.

“And I can get you a new identity,” he insisted, darting out of the way and using a waffle iron as a shield.

She nearly got him with the hand-held brulee torch and he batted out the small fire on his shirtsleeve before throwing his lanky frame over the stainless steel island bench and discovering a ladle, properly used, could disarm an assassin quite readily.

“And one for your girlfriend,” he said, crouched over Aggie’s supine form, pinning her down by shoulders, chest, hips and thighs as she glared death up at him. “You want her out of it too, don’t you? I can give that to you. I can _guarantee_ that both of you will escape with new passports. Money. Whatever you need. If you will help me to stop Milverton.”

Aggie Raczek stared at him until her eyes ached, and then her breath hitched and she demanded, dry-eyed but her voice full of desperation: “Janine too? You can get her away from him? You _promise_?”

“On my life,” he swore solemnly, “And on the lives of everyone I hold dear. Help me to ruin Milverton and you and Janine Nevin will have everything you need.”

“Tell me what you need,” she said hoarsely, fingers clenching convulsively like they were already around Milverton’s neck. “And I want to be the one who kills him.”

Spratt didn’t admit that the plan didn’t include killing, however tempting the notion was. He didn’t want to get her off side again so soon.

“I need to search every inch of this house,” he said, “To find the physical evidence he holds.”

“I’ve done it already,” she said scornfully.

“Help me do it again,” he said, “It’s only step one.”

He rose and let her get to her feet. He waited until she put both boning knife and torch down. He kept hold of the ladle.

Aggie tilted her head slightly one way, then another, an almost reptilian assessment. Then she nodded.

“You’ll wipe the house surveillance tapes?” he said, before they left the kitchen to explore the rest of the mansion.

“I’m not stupid,” said Aggie, “He’ll kill Janine if he sees I let you beat me.”

Spratt-really-Sherlock didn’t comment on that face-saving statement. He simply stepped into the house and began searching it for the secret room he knew must exist.

*

On the afternoon of the fourth day, Milverton’s special employees got John, on his way home from the clinic.

John gave a good account of himself, but it was five against one, and John wasn’t a superhero. He fought like a lion, though, and broke one man’s nose, one man’s knee, gave another a concussion, before one of the survivors finally got close enough to jab in the hypodermic, and he went down like a sack of coals.

The sirens were shrieking towards them before the attackers could load up all the injured as well as John in the van. Broken-nose and Concussion tumbled in, bleeding, but Broken Knee was left howling on the pavement for the Met to collect.

It had to be the Met. Mycroft couldn’t be seen to be too closely involved, but he was grateful for the surveillance he’d kept on John at least that far.

But his people lost the van, and there was nothing he could do about that.

*

“Where is he?”

“I don’ know. I don’ fuckin’ _know_.”

The slur came partly from the residual effects of the sedative, but John also spoke thickly out of a split lip. He had blood in his eye, too, from the cut in his brow.

“I think you do know.”

“You don’ know him very well then,” snarled John bitterly, “He’s a complete arse. He’s always fucking off and not telling me where he’s gone. You may have missed it in the news, but he let me think he was dead, once. Disappeared for a whole fucking year, while I took flowers to his grave every Sunday.”

“Yeah,” said his interrogator, a heavy-set thug of a man, “It was sweet, all that devotion. And he came back and you got married, so it’s all looking pretty lovey dovey from here.”

“He’s a dick,” muttered John, angrily, “Thinks he’s so fucking clever and he thinks I’m such a fucking idiot and he _did. Not. Tell. Me_.”

John Watson raised his battered face and glared at the men in front of him. They were going to start laying him to him properly soon. They’d only had him three hours, as far as he could figure, having been unconscious for at least an hour of the three.

They hadn’t been gentle with waking him, and he’d been slow about it. Slower than the drug really took. It wasn’t the first time he’d been subjected to this kind of abduction, working with Sherlock. But when the slapping around had turned to revenge punches for their injured comrades, John had stirred and ‘woken’. For all the advantage that gave him. Which was almost none.

Since then, his interrogators had already gone through the persuasive talk, a few more slaps and a more vigorous ‘softening up’. It wasn’t great, but nothing really bad yet.

Now his wrists were tied, starfish-like, to a metal frame while his unfastened feet only partly touched the floor, on the second storey of a warehouse (the view of the other old warehouse through the bank of cracked windows, the sound of water smacking into pylons somewhere nearby and below: he’d learned a thing or two from Sherlock after all). He had a split lip and a bleeding eyebrow and they’d start with those pliers soon, he was pretty sure, or the spanner. Maybe the hammer.

The one with the concussion and the one with the broken nose had disappeared to get treatment, no doubt, so John was left with the other two. The thug and the scrawny smoker.

“So you’re telling me your husband takes off and doesn’t tell you what he’s doing?”

“All the fucking time. We’re going to need counselling about it soon.” His tone remained bitter.

“I don’t believe you.”

“Nothing I can do about that.”

“You’re left-handed, aren’t you?”

John became very still and watched while his enemy picked up an adjustable spanner. He bit back a quip on how this prick was in fact a complete tool. No need to make it worse than it was going to be.

And it was going to be bad.

The blood drained from John’s face as the thug broke the pinkie finger of his left hand, too surprised to yell. Then he clamped down on a scream as the thug bypassed his ring finger to break the middle one. Then he hung there, panting, face sheened in sweat from the shock and the pain.

The scrawny smoker, sitting on a box by the window, laughed.

“Better get the ring off first, before I do _that_ finger,” said the thug with a grin, tugging gently at the ring finger. “Must be worth a bit.”

John proved he had a surprising amount of leverage still by grasping the frame to which his wrists were tied, twisting, using the wall to brace himself, and kicking the thug in the balls as hard as he could. They should really have taken his shoes off him first. Hard soles on these ones. They connected very solidly.

John grinned through the blood in his teeth at the unmusical scream that ensued, and the blood that seeped through the crotch of the thug’s trousers. The thug curled into a ball on the floor, clutching the damage between his legs, and cursing so violently that John picked up some new words.

“Better get a doctor to see to that,” John said savagely, “You fuckmuppet.”

The fuckmuppet’s second came up to John then, and put out his cigarette on the heel of the palm of John’s right hand.

“Where is he?”

John swallowed a sob of pain. Stoicism under torture, the army had told him, would certainly garner worse torture. Make a noise up front and they might ease up, do less. Don’t be a challenge.

_Well, fuck that._

John Watson clenched his teeth and tried to kill his enemy with a glare alone.

“Where is he?” Another burn, to his wrist this time.

It was getting harder to be stoic.

“ _I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know,_ the little shit _didn’t tell me_. _Again_. He promised he wouldn’t do that anymore, and he did it anyway. _He left and he didn’t tell me where_!”

Blood dripped from his mouth and brow down his face, onto his shirt, onto the floor. The smell of blood and blistered skin and ash made him feel nauseated, not for what they were, which was bad enough, but for the memories they evoked.

It wasn’t, John told himself resolutely, as bad as the blood and the burns that had filled his nostrils after IEDs had struck convoys in Afghanistan. It wasn’t as bad as being shot.

The cigarette pressed to the pulse point of his throat made him gasp, but he refused to even curse, and then the scrawny smoker backed off a little, to light up a fresh cigarette.

The thug was still curled up in a foetal position, sobbing and holding his crotch.

“I think I’m going to need some specialist help, don’t you Dr Watson?” said the scrawny smoker. He took out his mobile and pressed for someone on speed dial.

*

John had been missing for two hours when Sherlock appeared like a whirlwind at London Hospital, dishevelled and coldly collected. As soon as he got the signal from Mycroft that John had been taken, he had left Appledore. Not much more he could do there today, anyway. The whole thing had been almost, but not quite, fruitless.

He strode straight up to Lestrade and Donovan, consulting outside the hospital room where the kidnapper with the broken knee was being held.

“You haven’t made your prisoner talk yet?” Sherlock was scathing and hard as ice.

“He’s off his face on painkillers. We’re not getting much out of him. John gave ‘em a run for their money, at least,” said Lestrade, going for solicitous, but he backed off as though from a blow when Sherlock glared at him.

Sherlock promptly shoved his way into the patient’s room. Lestrade tried to stop him, but it was like a feather trying to halt the passage of a bullet.

Sherlock stared at the man in the bed. Then he pulled out the plastic bag containing the man’s clothes and shoes and flung them all over the bedding (and the injured limb beneath it).

The man with the broken kneecap whimpered, then fell silent at the murderous glare he received.

“If I don’t find him in time,” Sherlock said, in a soft and reasonable voice, “You will wish he’d broken your neck.”

“Sherlock…” Lestrade protested.

Sherlock flung everything but a shoe and the man’s telephone into the tin cupboard again. The shoe he sniffed, then flickered his tongue against the rubber sole and the heel. Then he threw the shoe over his shoulder so he could work on the phone with both hands. He jabbed in four digits, unlocking the screen, and rapidly moved through recent calls and texts.

He strode out of the room again then, compiling and sending a text from his own phone.

“Why’d they take John anyway?” Donovan wanted to know. She should have been angrier than she was about Sherlock’s treatment of the witness, but these days she could see past the stone exterior. Sherlock was _frantic_.

“To find out where _I_ was,” said Sherlock, frowning darkly,

“He won’t tell them, will he,” stated Lestrade, no question at all, equally dark. He knew these men. He thought he knew how far they’d go to protect each other.

“He’ll say he doesn’t know,” said Sherlock, stabbing a reply to the text he had just received. He snarled, a real animal snarl, at the screen, and pulled up a map.

“Doesn’t John know where you’ve been?” demanded Donovan, disbelieving and furious at him for leaving his husband so vulnerable.

“ _Of course he does_.” Sherlock’s tone was icy, or else it was inferno hot. One extreme or the other, but under such tight control it was hard to tell which. “But he’s not going to tell them. Because he’s an idiot.”

At their combined looks of offended horror, and with a red pixel pin descending on the telephone screen, Sherlock looked up at them, face like marble, but his eyes were burning.

“Bring three squad cars. And an ambulance.” His long, urgent stride took him to the stairs – he hadn’t the time to wait for a lift, not when he had only three flights of stairs down which to run. Donovan and Lestrade cursed in his wake, but followed, Donovan calling it in between breaths.

“Where am I sending them?” she demanded.

“Woolwich dockyard,” he snapped, “I’ll tell them exactly where when I know.”

Donovan was forced to take the back seat as Sherlock pushed his way into the front, beside the DI.

“Fuck, Sherlock,” Lestrade cursed, already driving off towards the dockside warehouses pinpointed on Sherlock’s map.

“Just get there. Faster. _Faster,_ Lestrade.”

“He’ll be all right,” Donovan tried to reassure him. Sherlock Holmes, marble-cold and machine-like in his rage was more than a little terrifying right now.

“Of course he will be,” said Sherlock in a voice like a knife’s edge, “He is brave, and clever, and strong, and he knows something they don’t know.”

“Which is?”

“He and I have no secrets,” said Sherlock, “And he knows I’m coming for him.”

*

In an empty warehouse close by the Woolwich Docks – identified through a combination of the colour, scent and taste of two soils, some tar and wild fennel crushed in the runners of a shoe, and corroborated with the nature of three of the twelve texts and an address in the contacts list of a phone – John Watson was watching with hollow satisfaction a thug clutching his bleeding crotch.

Two of John’s fingers were broken. He had bad cigarette burns on his hand, wrist and throat.

The fucker with the cigarette had called for back-up ten minutes ago and the sound of car doors closing outside meant said back-up had probably arrived.

John was glad the thug would probably never again contribute to the gene pool, but he had no illusions about what was coming next.

He had two convictions he held close to his heart, to keep it strong.

_If Milverton wants you this badly, honeybee, he’s not going to get you through me._

_When you come for me, these arseholes won’t know what hit them_.

Then John heard a shout, and several more shouts, one a warning, and then the sound of feet running across concrete. A revving car and a metallic crash. A heavy door slamming open; shut. Feet on stairs.

An unmistakable voice bellowing out across empty spaces.

**_“JOHN!”_ **

“ ** _SHERLO...!”_**

John was silenced by a blow, a fist smashed into his diaphragm that left him wheezing for breath. He dragged air in, and it hurt, and he looked up and the scrawny smoker had a gun out now, and a cigarette poised in front of John’s eye.

“You really should have told us,” smoker said, with a nasty smile.

And then, like a cartoon coyote disappearing from view, leaving only smears of colour behind, the scrawny smoker… disappeared sideways from view. Tackled away by a whirlwind.

John coughed, spitting out blood from the split lip and grinned at Sherlock, who had the smoker by nape and trouser seat, and flung him at the window. Regrettably, the arsehole caught himself before falling right through the cracked glass. John thought Sherlock might rectify this error by kicking the prick through anyway, but no.

Sherlock whirled and ran straight back to John, facing him, arms wide not to hold but to protect, and was shoved up against John’s strung-up form when the blow with the crowbar, meant for John’s head, caught Sherlock between the shoulder blades instead.

John winced as his face collided with Sherlock’s shoulder, but he inhaled sharp and deep, too. “Sherlock…”

Sherlock turned away though, wresting the attacker aside, getting hold of the crowbar and swinging it with ferocious accuracy, and the former attacker fell back, screeching, clutching a new-broken elbow.

Sherlock withdrew again, positioning himself in front of John, eyes hard, stance ready.

“No,” pleaded John hoarsely, and Sherlock shifted to face the smoker, who had recovered his gun, which was now pointed at Sherlock’s face.

The smoker grinned and shifted his aim. To John.

*

Lestrade and Donovan were fast, but not faster than Sherlock who had disappeared like a whirlwind.

Three men had pulled up in a black car and emerged just as they arrived. Squad cars and an ambulance were on their way, but still minutes behind. Minutes counted on days like these.

While Sherlock flew from the car, into the building, upstairs, bellowing John’s name, Lestrade dealt with one of the men from the black sedan by simply driving right at him. The perp leaped backwards into the car as Lestrade’s vehicle smacked into the door. He was handcuffed to the steering wheel within minutes.

Lestrade turned and ran in Sherlock and Donovan’s wake, into the warehouse. He passed a second of the new arrivals handcuffed to the rickety stairs and sporting a bloody nose, and kept running up.

He missed what Donovan had seen – the smoker thrown across the room, away from John; Sherlock protecting John with his body and then disarming and breaking a man’s arm with a crowbar.

He saw a gun raised, though, and pointed at John, bleeding and strung up by the wrists. He saw Sherlock turn and curl himself around John’s body and head, arms tight around his skull, and heard John’s voice breaking at last with, “ _No, sweetheart, no. Run. Run_.”

And he saw his Sergeant hurtle into the room and shoulder straight into the gunman, pushing them both _back back back_ to the bank of cracked windows, and Lestrade ran after her, reaching out, grabbing her by the back of her jacket as the momentum flung both Donovan and gunmen too close to that uncertain partition. Lestrade caught her and dragged her back to safety even as the other stumbled, fell against glass and frame that wouldn’t hold, and tipped, and fell (disappearing like a cartoon coyote) and screamed and screamed and…

Suddenly stopped screaming.

*

Lestrade pulled Donovan back against his chest and gave her a moment to stop shaking. At least, he thought it was her doing the shaking. Then she shoved away from him, stalking over to the man with the broken elbow, who was near passing out with the pain. She made sure he wasn’t armed and sat him beside the one with the bleeding crotch. The DI, she heard, was already calling for more ambulances and she could hear, too, their back-up finally arriving downstairs.

Donovan felt mildly sorry about the dead man, but she wasn’t sure if that wasn’t mostly to do with the horrible amount of paperwork it would entail. She thought she was a better human being than that, but right now, she couldn’t be arsed with compassion for the vile, murderous prick.

She and Lestrade both turned, and stopped, and were still, at the sight of Sherlock and John.

Sherlock had cut John down from the frame almost as soon as Donovan had tackled the gunman, and now he sat on the floor, John cradled in his arms.

“S’okay baby,” John was saying through a swollen mouth. His hands – fingers on the left bent all wrong, the right swelling from the burns – were curled on his stomach, where Sherlock had laid them gently. “S’okay. We’re okay. You’re okay.”

Sherlock rocked John gently, as though he didn’t know he was doing it. “Yes, John,” he said, in a voice so normal it was really quite strange, “I’m all right.” He kissed John’s bloodied brow. “You should have told them.”

“No, bear, no,” John disagreed in a sleepy slur, “They can’t have my bee. They can’t touch you. Sweetpea.”

Sherlock closed his eyes and pressed his cheek to John’s hair. The man of marble crumbled away, and a man of flesh and blood looked so relieved yet so distraught all at once that Sally Donovan wondered how she had ever thought Sherlock Holmes had no heart.

*

Charles Augustus Milverton was angry. The digging operation had failed. Sherlock Holmes had come out of hiding, but Milverton still had no idea where the sneaky bastard had been. He also still had no idea what Holmes was planning, although the certainty that it was something sneaky, and clever, and _final_ was a cold ache in his bones.

 _Well, Sherlock Smartarse Fucking Holmes_ , thought Milverton, _I have plans myself, and to spare. You and your husband and your brother and your entire family will beg for an end to the humiliation when I am done with you. You will be my dog, and my whore, and you won’t even piss unless I say you can piss, when I’m done with you._

And Charles Augustus Milverton set in motion a plan, conceived only recently but already ripe for the undertaking.

Charles Augustus Milverton had a strong belief in his untouchability.

Charles Augustus Milverton’s belief, however, was very much mistaken.


End file.
